In the first episode, Curtis tracks the effects of Ayn Rand's ideas on American financial markets, particularly via the influence on Alan Greenspan.

Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand was born in Russia and moved to America in 1928. She worked for Cecil B. DeMille, where she received inspiration for what would later become The Fountainhead. Later, she moved to New York and set up a reading group called The Collective where they considered her work. On advice from a friend, Greenspan (then a logical positivist) joined The Collective.

When published, although critically savaged, Rand's Objectivist ideas were popular and influenced people working in the technology sector of California. The Californian Ideology, a techno-utopian belief that computer networks could measure, control and self-stabilise societies, without hierarchical political control, and that people could become 'Randian heroes', only working for their own happiness, became widespread in Silicon Valley.

Rand entered into an affair with Nathaniel Branden, another married person in The Collective, which she proposed to justify in terms of her value of "rationality", and with the approval of his wife. After several years, the affair ended violently and it was revealed to the rest of The Collective, which broke up. Rand ended up alone in her New York apartment, although Greenspan continued to visit.

Alan Greenspan

Greenspan entered government in the 70s, and became Chairman of the Federal Reserve. In 1992 he visited the newly elected Bill Clinton. He persuaded him to let the markets grow, cut taxes, and to let the markets stabilise themselves with computer technology, to create the New economy. This involved using computer models to predict risks and hedge against them, in accordance with the Californian Ideology. However, by 1996, the production figures had failed to increase, but profits were nevertheless increasing; and Greenspan suggested that it wasn't working. After political attacks from all sides, Greenspan changed his mind and decided that perhaps the New Economy was real, but that it couldn't be measured using normal economic measures, and so the apparent boom continued.

In 1994 Carmen Hermosillo published a widely influential essay online, "Pandora's Vox: On Community in Cyberspace",[4] and it began to be argued that the result of computer networks had led to, not a reduction in hierarchy, but actually a commodification of personality and a complex transfer of power and information to companies.

Although the Asian miracle had led to long-term growth in South Korea and other countries Joseph Stiglitz began warning that the withdrawing of foreign financial investment from the Far Eastern economies could cause devastation there. However, he was unable to warn the president, being blocked by Robert Rubin, who feared damage to financial interests.

Robert Rubin

The 1997 Asian financial crisis began as the property bubble in the Far East began to burst in Thailand, causing large financial losses in those countries that greatly affected foreign investors. While Bill Clinton was preoccupied with the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Robert Rubin took control of foreign policy and forced loans onto the affected countries. However, after each country agreed to IMF bailout loans, foreign investors immediately withdrew their money, leaving the tax payers with enormous debts and triggering massive economic disasters.

After his handling of the economic effects of 9/11 Alan Greenspan became more important, and in the wake of the Enron scandal he cut interest rates to stimulate the economy. Unusually, this ostensibly failed to cause inflation. It seemed that the New Economy was working to stabilise the economy.

However, in reality, to avoid a repeat of the earlier collapse, China's Politburo had decided to manage America's economy via similar techniques to those used by America on the other Far Eastern countries; by keeping China's exchange rate artificially low, they sold cheap goods to America, and with the proceeds, had bought American bonds. The money flooding into America permitted massive loans to be available to those that would previously be considered too risky. The belief in America was that computers could stabilise and hedge the lending of the money. This permitted lending beyond the point that was actually sustainable. The high level of loan defaulting led ultimately to the 2008 collapse due to a similar housing bubble that the Far Eastern countries had previously faced.

Curtis ends the piece by pointing out that not only had the idea of market stability failed to be borne out in practice, but that the Californian Ideology had also been unable to stabilise it; indeed the ideology has not led to people being Randian heroes but in fact trapped them into a rigid system of control from which they are unable to escape.

In the 1960s, an idea penetrated deep into the public imagination that nature is a self-regulating ecosystem, there is a natural order," Curtis says. "The trouble is, it's not true – as many ecologists have shown, nature is never stable, it's always changing.

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Norbert Wiener

This episode investigates how machine ideas such as cybernetics and systems theory were applied to natural ecosystems, and how this relates to the false idea that there is a balance of nature. Cybernetics has been applied to human beings to attempt to build societies without central control, self organising networks built of people, based on a fantasy view of nature.

Arthur Tansley had a dream where he shot his wife. He wanted to know what it meant, so he studied Sigmund Freud. However, one part of Freud's theory was that the human brain was an electrical machine. Tansley became convinced that, as the brain was interconnected, so was the whole of the natural world, in networks he called ecosystems, which he believed were inherently self-stable and self-correcting and which regulated nature as if it were a machine.

Jay Forrester was an early pioneer in cybernetic systems, who believed that brains, cities and even societies live in networks of feedback loops that control them, and he thought that computers could determine the effects of the feedback loops. Cybernetics therefore viewed humans as nodes in networks, as machines.

The ecology movement adopted this idea also and viewed the natural world as systems as it explained how the natural system could stabilise the natural world, via natural feedback loops.

Norbert Wiener laid out the position that humans, machines and ecology are simply nodes in a network in his book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, and this book became the bible of cybernetics.

Howard T. Odum

Howard T. Odum and Eugene Odum were brothers who were both ecologists. Howard collected data from ecological systems and built electronic networks to simulate them. His brother Eugene then took these ideas to make them the heart of ecology, and the hypothesis then became a certainty. However, they had distorted the idea, and simplified the data to an extraordinary degree. That ecology was balanced became an unexamined and unscientific assumption.

Buckminster Fuller

Meanwhile, in the 1960s Buckminster Fuller invented a radically new kind of structure, the geodesic dome which emulated ecosystems by being made of highly connected, relatively weak parts. His other system based ideas inspired the Counterculture movement. Communes of people considering themselves as nodes in a network, without hierarchy, and applied feedback to try to control and stabilise their societies, and used his domes as habitats. These societies mostly broke up within 3 years.

In 1967 Richard Brautigan published the poetry work All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace which called for a cybernetic ecological utopia consisting of a fusion of computers and mammals living in perfect harmony and stability. This part of the documentary appears to borrow from, or the arguments closely echoed, in Andrew Kirk's 2007 environmental history of the California appropriate technology movement and Stewart Brand, "Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism".

By the 1970s new problems such as overpopulation, limited natural resources and pollution that couldn't be solved by normal hierarchical systems had arrived. Jay Forrester stated that he knew how to solve this, and applied systems theory to the problem and drew a cybernetic system diagram for the world. This was turned into a computer model, which predicted population collapse. This became the basis of the model that was used by the Club of Rome, and the findings from this were published in The Limits to Growth. Forrester then argued for zero growth, to maintain a steady state stable equilibrium within the capacity of the Earth.

Jan Smuts

However, this was opposed by many people within the environmental movement, since the model didn't allow for people to change their values to stabilise the world, and they argued that the model tried to maintain and enforce the current political hierarchy. Arthur Tansley who had invented the term ecosystem, had once accused Field Marshal Jan Smuts of the abuse of vegetational concepts. Smuts had invented a philosophy called holism, where everyone had a 'rightful place', which was to be managed by white races. The 70s protestors claimed that the same conceptual abuse of the supposed natural order was occurring, that it was really being used for political control.

At the time, there was a general belief in the stability of natural systems. However cracks started to appear when a study was made of predator-prey relationship of wolf and elks. It was found that wild population swings had occurred over centuries. Other studies then found huge variations, and a significant lack of homeostasis in natural systems. George Van Dyne then tried to build a computer model, to try to simulate a complete ecosystem based on extensive real-world data, so as to show how the stability of natural systems actually worked. To his surprise the computer model did not stabilize like the Odums' electrical model had. The reason for this lack of stabilization was that he had used extensive data which more accurately reflected reality whereas the Odums and other previous ecologists had "ruthlessly simplified nature." The scientific idea had thus been shown to fail, but the popular idea remained, and even grew as it apparently offered the possibility of a new egalitarian world order.

In 2003, a wave of spontaneous revolutions swept through Asia and Europe. Coordinated only by the internet, nobody seemed to be in overall charge, and no overall aims except self-determination and freedom were apparent. This seemed to justify the beliefs of the computer utopians.

However, the freedom from these revolutions in fact lasted for only a short time. Curtis compared them with the hippie communes, all of which had broken up within three years at the most, by "the very thing that was supposed to have been banished: power." Aggressive members of the group began to bully the weaker ones, who were unable to band together in their own defence because formal power structures had been prohibited by the commune's rules, and even intervention against bullying by benevolent individuals was discouraged.

Adam Curtis closes the piece by stating that it has become apparent that while the self-organising network is good at organising change, it is much less good at what comes next; networks leave people helpless in the face of people already in power in the world.

In 1960 Congo had become independent from Belgium, but governance promptly collapsed, and towns became battle grounds as soldiers fought for control of the mines. America and the Belgians organised a coup and the elected leader, Patrice Lumumba, was kidnapped and executed, creating chaos. The Western mining operations were largely unaffected, however.

Bill Hamilton was a solitary man, and he saw everything through the lens of Darwin's theory of evolution. When he wanted to know why some ants and humans gave up their life for others, he went to Waterloo station and stared at humans for hours, and looked for patterns. In 1963 he realised that most of the behaviours of humans was due to genes, and looking at the humans from the genes' point of view. Humans were machines that were only important for carrying genes, and that it made sense for a gene to sacrifice a human if it meant that another copy of the gene elsewhere would prosper.

In the 1930s Armand Denis made films that told the world about Africa. However, his documentary gave fanciful stories about Rwanda's Tutsis being a noble ruling elite originally from Egypt, whereas the Hutus were a peasant race. In reality they were racially the same and the Belgian rulers had ruthlessly exploited the myth. But when it came to create independence, liberal Belgians felt guilty, and decided that the Hutus should overthrow the Tutsi rule. This led to a blood bath, as the Tutsis were then seen as aliens and were slaughtered.

John von Neumann in the 1940s

In 1967 American George R. Price went to London after reading Hamilton's little known papers and discovering that he was already familiar with the equations, that they were the equations of computers. He was able to show that the equations explained murder, warfare, suicide, goodness, spite, since these behaviours could help the genes. John von Neumann had invented self-reproducing machines, but Price was able to show that the self-reproducing machines were already in existence, that humans were the machines.

This had a bad effect on Price, and Price began to believe that these equations had been given to him by God, even though the equations disproved the existence of God.

In Congo, a civil war was ongoing, and Dian Fossey, who was researching gorillas was captured. She escaped and created a new camp high up on a mountain in Rwanda, where she continued to study gorillas. She tried to completely protect the gorillas, which were very susceptible to human diseases, and with the best of intentions, terrorised the local people and became hated.

In 1973, after converting to extreme Christianity, as a last chance to disprove the selfish gene theories' gloomy conclusions Price decides to start helping poor and homeless people all his possessions in acts of pure altruism, influenced and inspired by Christian religion.

President Mobutu

In the Congo, Mobutu Sese Seko changed the Congo's name to Zaire and looted millions of dollars and let mines and industries collapse, killed his opponents and stopped a liberal democracy from forming.

While this was happening, at Fossey's camp, Digit, her favourite gorilla had been killed, and later she was too.

Price's attempt to disprove Hamilton's theory had utterly failed, and he comes to believe he is being followed by the hound of heaven. He finally reveals, in his suicide note, that these acts of altruism brought more harm than good to the lives of homeless people.

Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins took the equations and popularised them and explains that humans are simply machines created by the selfish genes; and in a sense reinventing the immortal soul, but as computer code in the form of the genes.

In 1994 the ruling Hutu government set out to eradicate the Tutsi minority. This was explained as incomprehensible ancient rivalry by the Western press. In reality it was due to the Belgian myth created during the colonial rule. Western agencies got involved, and the Tutsi fought back creating chaos. Many flooded across the border into Zaire, and the Tutsi invaded the refuge camps to get revenge. Mobutu fell from power. Troops arrived from many countries, allegedly to help, but in reality to gain access to the country's natural resources, used to produce consumer goods for the west. 4.5 million people died.

Hamilton by this point was well-honoured. However, by now he supported eugenics. He heard a story that HIV had been created from an accident with a polio vaccine, which it was thought could have been infected with a chimp virus. This supported his idea that modern medicine could be negative as he thought medicine opposed the logic of the genes. So he travelled to eastern Congo to look for the virus, through the midst of the murder and chaos. He died, and later research disproved the idea that HIV had come from a medical accident.

Curtis ends the piece by saying that Hamilton's ideas that humans are computers controlled by the genes have been accepted. But he asks whether we have accepted a fatalistic philosophy that humans are helpless computers to explain and excuse the fact that, as in the Congo, we are unable to improve and change the world.

Catherine Gee at the Daily Telegraph said that what Adam Curtis "reveals is the dangers of human beings at their most selfish and self-satisfying. Showing no compassion or consideration for your fellow human beings creates a chasm between those able to walk over others and those too considerate – or too short-sighted – to do so."[8]

John Preston also reviewed the first episode, and said that although it showed flashes of brilliance it had an "infuriating glibness too as the web of connectedness became ever more stretched. No one could dispute that Curtis has got a very big bite indeed. But what about the chewing, you ask. There wasn’t any – or nothing like enough of it to prevent a bad case of mental indigestion."[9]

Andrew Anthony published a review in The Observer and The Guardian, and commented on the central premise that we had been made to "believe we could create a stable world that would last for ever" but that he doesn't "recall ever believing that 'we' could create a stable world that would last for ever", and noted that: "For the film-maker there seems to be an objective reality that a determined individual can penetrate if he is willing to challenge the confining chimeras of markets and machines. Forget the internet tycoons. The Randian hero is Curtis himself."[10]

Curtis' style is exemplified by frequent and often incongruous cuts of film and music, often lasting only a fraction of a second, a technique similar to sampling. Music used 'at length', or repeatedly, includes: